HotmailAnne Rice goes from vampires to Jesus
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By the late 1990s, when she went back to Mass, Rice — the author whose books sold in the tens of millions and who had recharged Hollywood's appetite for vampire-inspired horror — had fallen on hard times.
Her husband, poet and artist Stan Rice, died of a brain tumor in 2002. And she had become victim to diabetes.
Always over-the-top and beyond the rational, she writes that her return of faith was preceded by a series of epiphanies — many while on travels to Europe's cathedrals, Israel and Brazil. In one episode, when she visited the giant Jesus statue above Rio de Janeiro, she writes that she felt "delirium" as the clouds broke and revealed the statue.
Her professed revelations recall the religious intoxication she describes of her childhood.
When she was 12, she had her father turn a room on the back porch of the family's Uptown home in New Orleans into an oratory modeled after St. Rose of Lima — the saint Catholics believe turned roses into floating crosses. She wanted to be a saint, she writes.
In the memoir, Rice describes a familiar Catholic upbringing imbued with opulence and mystery. The incense. The statuary. The stained glass. The darkness. She learned the world, she writes, through her senses, through a "preliterate" understanding of the world. She writes that she possessed "an internal gallery of pictorial images" that, lamentably, was replaced “by the alphabetic letters” she learned later.
“You might call it the Mozart effect, but it was the Catholic effect on me,” she said.
In a sense, the memoir also is a confessional about her struggle as a writer to be a reader, a thinker and an author with a distinct literary style. Her stories often are reveries with no end in sight — and all too often ugly with pedantic unwinding, numbing in detail and overly simplistic, a pastiche of cliches.
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In The New York Times, Christopher Buckley slammed Rice's memoir as “a crashing, mind-numbing bore. This is the literary equivalent of waterboarding.”
And the bar is high when it comes to writing about Jesus.
"The best may be Nikos Kazantzakis' 'The Last Temptation of Christ,'" said Jason Berry, a novelist and journalist who has written extensively on the Catholic priest sex abuse scandal. “But also (G.K.) Chesterton, Norman Mailer. ... A lot of narrative artists in both literature and film have taken on Jesus, so to speak.”
Rice isn't out to impress the critics, though.
“My objective is simple: It's to write books about our Lord living on Earth that make him real to people who don't believe in him; or people who have never really tried to believe in him,” she said.
She pressed the point: “I mean, I've made vampires believable to grown women. Now, if I can do that, I can make our Lord Jesus Christ believable to people who've never believed in him. I hope and pray.”
For her devotees, whatever she writes invariably goes down like a smooth bloodbath, that favorite Goth beverage sometimes made with raspberry liqueur, red wine and cranberry juice.
“There are so many people dedicated to her. They want her to write more vampire books," said Marta Acosta, author of the popular “Casa Dracula” series, a “comedy of manners” that plays on vampire themes. She also runs the Vampire Wire, a book blog for fans of gore and the undead.
As for her, Acosta couldn't care less if Rice sinks back into the vampire vein.
“People think it's sexual, but it's not. It's suppressed stuff. Southern Gothic,” Acosta said. "How many centuries is Louis (played by Brad Pitt in the movie 'Interview With the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles') going to whine?”
Never again, it seems.
Rice is busy writing about Jesus as a minister. And that's a tall order, Rice said.
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